74 ROY AL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
passed away, his youngest son, too, was sinking to the grave. “I prefer 
the natale solum to all other,” he said; but as the Anglo-Saxon schism 
widened, he wrote, “ most of us expect to leave our bones here.” 
He was loyal to the last. “ After all,” he records as his deliberate 
conviction, “TI shall never see that there were just grounds for this 
revolt.” He adds with much point : “T should be impertinent if I 
attempted to shew . . . . in what sense all men are created equal; 
or how far life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be said to be 
unalienable; only I could wish to ask the delegates of Maryland, Vir- 
ginia, and the Carolinas how their constituents justify the depriving 
more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these 
rights are so absolutely unalienable.” 
He wrote to his son Thomas, who did not leave Boston till the 
British evacuation in March, 1776, instructing him to remove the 
remains of the wife of his youth who had lain in the old Copp’s Hill 
burying ground, to the family tomb on his country estate ; and he 
charged the son to see that room was left for his father by her side. But 
even this hope had to be given up, and he writes : “The prospect of 
returning to America and laying my bones in the land of my forefathers 
for four preceding generations is less than it has ever been. God grant 
me a composed mind submissive to his will.” 
In his seventieth year the end came. The courtly old Loyalist, 
feeling the approach of death, bade his servant bring him a fresh shirt, 
saying that he “ must die clean,” and shortly after his heroic soul passed 
away. His last conscious moment he spent in repeating texts of scrip- 
ture and prayers. 
“ At the moment of his death,” says Hosmer, “ London was at the 
mercy of the mob in the Gordon riots. The city was on fire in many 
places; a drunken multitude murdered right and left, laying hands even 
upon the noblest of the land. The exile’s funeral passed on its way 
through smoke and uproar that might easily have been regarded as the 
final crash of the social structure.” 
Out of seeming evil Divine Providence wrought lasting good. 
Before the close of the following century the Empire had expanded 
to many times its extent and influence at the time of the American 
Revolution. In Canada and Australia great commonwealths had grown 
up. The revolted colonies also had become a great nation offering a 
vast area for the extension of the English language and English litera- 
ture and the principles of British law and liberty. The bitterness and 
estrangement of war had largely passed away; the An2lo-Saxon schism 
was well nigh, or altogether, healed. 
